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Using 17Th Century Medicine to Analyze the Early Modern Woman Vassar College Digital Window @ Vassar Senior Capstone Projects 2019 Notions of the biologically inferior: using 17th century medicine to analyze the early modern woman Setse Bush Vassar College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone Recommended Citation Bush, Setse, "Notions of the biologically inferior: using 17th century medicine to analyze the early modern woman" (2019). Senior Capstone Projects. 864. https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone/864 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Window @ Vassar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Digital Window @ Vassar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Vassar College Notions of the Biologically Inferior: Using 17th Century Medicine to Analyze the Early Modern Woman Setse Bush Spring 2019 Zoltan Markus Bush 2 Acknowledgements: I thank Dr. Zoltan Markus for his invaluable support and guidance, without which I would not have discovered my love for early modern plays and literature. I thank my parents, Daniel Bush and Soe Soe Thwin, for their willingness to edit my thesis drafts, even in the midst of their own busy schedules. Most of all, I thank Vassar College and its wealth of dedicated and passionate professors. These last four years at Vassar have prepared me to step into the world and make a difference, in any way I can. Bush 3 For centuries now, historians have used resources, old and new, to imagine new models for understanding the female body in early modern England. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, a Milton scholar and author of Writing Women in Jacobean England, uses previously unidentified texts by early modern English women to “question new historicist paradigms that…have been accepted too uncritically” (Kathryn Anderson 218). Gail Kern Paster, author of Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy, takes an entirely different approach, using Hippocrates’s humoral theory to contextualize the early modern ideal of excessive femininity. As we discover untapped resources, it is imperative that we reimagine the female body in new and improved contexts. In preserving the trend of questioning the constructs of early modern literature and culture, Anderson writes, “we may be led to recognize important aspects of early modern literature and culture that the overused new historicist formula, subversion and containment, may obscure” (218). In this thesis, I show how early modern medical texts can provide useful context for understanding representations of female bodies in literature and culture. Through careful examination of medical texts, we can conceptualize the demands placed upon the female body in the gendered power hierarchy in early modern England. Nicolaas Fonteyn’s The Womans Doctour, which is the basis of this thesis, is an unexplored text that provides extensive explanations of women’s diseases and their causes. Embedded in his documentation of female illness is a detailed scrutiny of the humoral biomechanics of women’s bodies, which we can use to deconstruct female characters in the plays of that time. If Fonteyn’s explanatory work offers us a skeletal perspective of the early modern English conceptualization of the female body, Ben Jonson’s fictional Bartholomew’s Fair (1614) puts the flesh on the bones. In Bartholomew’s Fair, Jonson probes the relationship Bush 4 between womanhood and sin. Because Jonson is known for his humoral comedies, wherein every character represents a specific humoral deficiency, Bartholomew’s Fair contained subtle - and not so subtle - references to the same medical theories that Fonteyn deliberates. Bush 5 I. Hippocrates, Galen, and the Emergence of Medicine Hippocrates of Kos, a Greek philosopher and physician, was the mastermind behind the humoral theory. Hippocrates grew up in a family of passionate medical professionals, and at a young age had already developed ideas about the human body and how it worked (Yapijakis 3). Yet, while Hippocrates has been the appointed ‘father of medicine’ since antiquity, medicine as a discipline did not exist in 300 BCE as it does now. Hippocrates was a thinker; first and foremost, he was a philosopher in his time, and his gifts to modern medicine blossomed out of a background of philosophy. His most popular treatises and ethical manuals on medicine include The Hippocratic Oath, Embassy, On Airs, Waters, and Places, and The Book of Prognostics. The ancient library at Alexandria contained the entire Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of over 70 of his works (Serageldin 396). In the thick of his insights into the nature of the human body and mind, his most popular theory of human physiology was born: the humoral theory. In the humoral theory, the human body contains four essential fluids or humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. Each humor exists on its own terms within the body, and contributes differently to the overall ‘health’ of the individual. Some modern- day physicians, including R. G. Macfarlane, have argued the possibility that the humoral theory refers simply to the four components of blood: plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets (American Society of Hematology). In “English Waeta and the Medical Theory of the Humours,” Lois Ayoub posits that the four humors may resemble “blood taken from patients suffering from certain diseases [which] tend[s] to separate into Bush 6 layers” (334). This proposition accurately reflects the practice of ancient Greek philosophers to utilize empirical observation in medicinal practice. From these early empirical observations of Hippocrates, the humoral theory took on other characteristics over time, some attributed to Hippocrates, and others to Galen of Pergamum and those that followed. The core ideas that merged to form the humoral theory of 17th century England came directly from Hippocrates’s work. The other humoral variables, such as age and season can be traced to a number of outstanding Greek philosophers, including Galen of Pergamum. Galen of Pergamum was arguably the second father of the humoral theory; he created addendums to Hippocrates’s works that emphasized the relationship between humor and character. Galen of Pergamum was born almost three centuries after Hippocrates into a family that fully supported Galen’s medical and philosophical ventures, funding his attendance at one of the most prestigious schools in Alexandria, Egypt (Ludwig and Nutton 1). Galen was born into the Hellenistic period (323 BCE-31 BCE), a time of immense research into human anatomy and the development of new theories and ideas. Galen was an innovative scholar, and became known for his dedication to anatomy. His penchant for looking at medicine in terms of internal workings influenced Galen’s view of the humoral theory and changed forever how the world would see it thereafter. Galen venerated Hippocrates for his contribution to physiology, and used the basis of the humoral theory for his own work. While Hippocrates presented the four humors in conjunction with specific temperaments (e.g. an excess of yellow bile made a man bilious), and medical conditions, Galen complicated Hippocrates’s ‘cause and effect’ Bush 7 mechanism by adding additional variables (e.g. age, seasons, time) that altered humoral composition. Most notably, Galen proposed a relationship between personality and humor that changed Hippocratic medicine profoundly. In Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen, Jacques Jouanna writes that Galen intensified the “relationship between the humours and character, of which there is no trace in the Nature of Man, but which lies at the heart of the theory of the four temperaments” (339). After Galen’s death, the humoral theory became increasingly popular due in part to this physiognomic component. In fact, its acclaim was further enhanced by the accessibility of physiognomy to authors and artists alike. Yet, it is in the popularity of Galen’s texts that the ideas of Hippocrates and his humoral theory survived antiquity. In “The Language of Medicine,” Henrik Wulff chronicles the movement of medicinal texts through the Greek era, the Roman conquest, the Middle Ages, and into early modern England. Galen’s texts not only survived the fall of the Roman Empire but gained popularity in the hands of Arab scholars. Around 1478 AD, Galen’s work was first published in Latin (Wulff 1), and to date, Galen’s texts comprise “more than ten percent of all Greek literature that has survived from Homer to the end of the second century” (Jouanna 1). As a renowned physician, Galen’s assertions, which were seamlessly intertwined with those of Hippocrates, “were widely quoted and summarized in later medical compilations” (Ayoub 335), as well as early modern literature. Galen’s contribution to, and subsequent popularization of, the humoral theory was paramount in the thinking of early modern English society because it pervaded not only medical practice but also culture. In particular, the physiognomic practices of the humors helped create and perpetuate social stigmas around certain groups of people. Bush 8 Delineating the shift from Hippocrates’s conceptualization of humors to Galen’s is salient in our discussion of the humoral theory in city comedies, because it was the later Galenic tradition that associated the medicinal humoral theory with human character and temperament (Jouanna 339). In “On Hippocrates On the Nature of Man," Galen compares his understanding of humors with that of Hippocrates. For Hippocrates, the health of a man was so contingent on a perfectly balanced humoral body that even “if one of these things [humors] born into man were to fail, the man would not be able to live” (Galen 31). Here, Galen concurs with Hippocrates, but in an appendix asserts the importance of character when assessing the four humors. In Galen’s view, not only are the four humors “shown to be instrumental in the origin of character suited to them” (Galen 95-97), but each individual humor is also responsible for different characteristics.
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